Fay Weldon - Bio

Fay Weldon was supposed to be born in New Zealand, but instead was born in England in 1931. At 5 weeks old she and her mother returned to New Zealand.
Her father was a doctor and her mother was awriter of commercial fiction under the pen name "Pearl Bellairs", among others. Her parents divorced when she was five. She lived with her mother, sister and grandmother until she started college and,as a result, grew up believing "the world was peopled by females."
She returned to England with her mother and studied economics and psychology at the University of St Andrews in Scotland.
Heractual christened name was "Franklin Birkinshaw" (something to do with her mother's interest in numerology) which she feels contributed to her being accepted at St Andrews and permitted to studyeconomics: the school assumed she was a male student applicant. (Sounds very much like a Fay Weldon novel, doesn't it?)
In her early twenties she was briefly married to a man more than twenty years hersenior. It is not clear whether she had her first son during this marriage or earlier.
Raising her son as a single mother, she looks back on her twenties as times fraught with "odd jobs and hardtimes." She worked on the problem page of the Daily Mirror and then as a copywriter for the Foreign Office. She then embarked on an extremely successful career as an advertising copywriter becoming famousfor her slogan 'Go to work on an egg'.
"Advertising was the only thing I could do in order to earn a decent enough living. . . I did it for about eight years."
She married Roy Weldon in 1962 andhad three more sons. She then went through a mid-life crisis: "I was thirty, inadequate and depressed and ignorant, and knew it." She went through psychoanalysis, which gave her the self-knowledge andcourage to give up advertising and start writing. Her first novel, The Fat Woman's Joke, was published in 1967, but by then she had already written some fifty plays for radio, stage, or tv the most...